Game Development Community

Shaders on Radeon X1300/1550 series

by Sim Ops Studios · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 07/31/2007 (7:50 am) · 5 replies

Greetings!

We're getting a problem with TGEA on a single artist's machine. On all the other machines in the office (a mixture of Nvidia and Radeon cards), the TGEA runs more-or-less flawlessly. However, on one artist's Radeon X1300/X1550 series card, the shader pipeline seems to completely crash; for the standard demo, he gets a magenta screen for building-internal views and all of the terrain is black for his external views. The water shader demo looks different, but not better...



When running the demo, we see the following on the console:

Initializing GFXCardProfiler (D3D9)
o Vendor : 'ATI Technologies Inc.'
o Card : 'ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x7183)'
o Version: '67.06'
- Scanning card capabilities...
GFXCardProfiler (D3D9) - Setting capability 'autoMipMapLevel' to 1.
GFXCardProfiler (D3D9) - Setting capability 'maxTextureWidth' to 4096.
GFXCardProfiler (D3D9) - Setting capability 'maxTextureHeight' to 4096.
- Loading card profiles...
- Loading card profile profile/D3D9.cs
- Loading card profile profile/D3D9.ATITechnologiesInc.cs
- No card profile profile/D3D9.ATITechnologiesInc.ATIRadeonGraphicsProcessor0x7183.cs exists
- No card profile profile/D3D9.ATITechnologiesInc.ATIRadeonGraphicsProcessor0x7183.6706.cs exists
Executing common/ui/defaultProfiles.cs.
Executing common/ui/ConsoleDlg.gui.
Texture Manager
- Approx. Available VRAM: 268435456
- Threshold VRAM: 67108864
- Quality mode: high
Executing common/ui/MessageBoxOkDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/MessageBoxYesNoDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/MessageBoxOKCancelDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/MessagePopupDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/HelpDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/RecordingsDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/NetGraphGui.gui.
Executing common/ui/LoadFileDlg.gui.
Executing common/ui/SaveFileDlg.gui.
Executing common/client/metrics.cs.
Executing common/ui/FrameOverlayGui.gui.
Executing common/client/messageBox.cs.
Executing common/client/screenshot.cs.
Executing common/client/cursor.cs.
Executing common/client/help.cs.
Executing common/client/recordings.cs.
Executing common/client/shaders.cs.
Executing common/lighting/sgShaders.cs.
GFXD3DShader::initVertShader - no compiled code produced; possibly missing file 'shaders/legacyTerrain/terrainDynamicLightingMaskV.hlsl'?
GFXD3DShader::initVertShader - unable to compile shader!
GFXD3DShader::initPixShader - no compiled code produced; possibly missing file 'shaders/legacyTerrain/terrainDynamicLightingMaskP.hlsl'?
GFXD3DShader::initVertShader - no compiled code produced; possibly missing file 'shaders/legacyTerrain/terrainDynamicLightingV.hlsl'?
GFXD3DShader::initVertShader - unable to compile shader!
. . . etc . . .

Unfortunately, those files do exist, so I believe we have ruled out pathing issues.

We are running on Windows XP Home, and the card in question is a Radeon X1300/X1550 series card (version 2.0.6645) running driver version 6.15.10.6645 (atioglxx.dll).

I'm a bit at a loss as to how to tackle this problem, since I am very new to shaders in general (and TGEA in particular). Does anyone know what the problem could be? Failing that, can anyone walk me through (or point me to a tutorial for) taking either the 'dancing orc' demo or the water demo and paring it down to the bare minimum amount of shader complexity possible? Ideally, I'd like to strip out the shaders completely as a sanity check; but if that's technologically impossible in TGEA, reducing to a no-frills flat lighting demo would be sufficient.

Thank you for your help!
-Mark
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque Game Engine Advanced


Torque Owner Brian Richardson
#1
07/31/2007 (8:57 am)
Have you tried updating the DirectX runtimes?

FWIW, I'm developing on an ATI x1300 right now and it's working for me. So it's likely to be something else in the environment.

Torque Owner Thomas Oliver
#2
07/31/2007 (1:22 pm)
Yes you will want to update his DirectX to whatever runtime was used to compile that copy of the engine. Had this same problem with a 8600 GT Geforce.

Sim Ops Studios (#0001)
Default Studio Name
#3
08/01/2007 (8:33 am)
Hello again! This is Mark; we recently upgraded to the commercial license, which is why I'm posting from a different account.

Brian and Tom, we tried your suggestions and unfortunately haven't made a dent in the problem yet. We also verified the card with dxdiag; there don't appear to be any problems with the card itself. We're using the DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) driver, and the graphics card's drivers are the latest available from Windows Update. When we delete all the objects in the scene (including the 'space orc' player model), the terrain goes from all black to all white, but that's the only effect we've been able to have on the situation.

We're going to try swapping out graphics cards; this may get the engine operational for our artist, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem (and leaves us in a bit of a state when we start getting customer reports about issues with the x1300, of course). Any further suggestions anyone has would be most welcome!

Thank you for your help,
Mark

Torque Owner Brian Richardson
#4
08/01/2007 (10:27 am)
Something else to try is to manually compile those shaders with the stand-alone HLSL compiler and see if an error is generated for some reason.

Sim Ops Studios (#0001)
Default Studio Name
#5
08/01/2007 (12:30 pm)
We have solved the problem; thank you all for all of your help!

We re-installed the DirectX SDK from Microsoft's website, and this time it worked. Whether there was a problem with the previous installations actually installing correctly or something in the most recent August 2007 update fixed the issue, we do not know. But re-installing the DirectX runtime seems to have solved the problem.

Thank you again! We're looking forward to wrapping our brains around the shader engine to accomplish our goals.

-Mark